China is test bed for new ad techniques

China and other Asian media markets are likely to turn into exporters to the West of advertising on mobile and other interactive media over the coming year, executives at international media buying groups predicted on Monday. Read original article.

Experts believe the scale of markets such as China, and the proliferation of groups that own assets across different media classes, is encouraging Western brands to develop new marketing techniques which they will later bring to Europe and the US.

Opportunities to test mobile advertising, which has been slow to develop in Europe, are seen as particularly strong in the region.

Sprite, the soft drink brand owned by Coca-Cola, is about to launch in the US a version of a mobile-based social networking service, Sprite Yard, first developed in China. Aegis, the UK-listed media buying group which developed the campaign, plans to roll out the service to eight markets by end of next year in a bid to make it the first international attempt to provide a social networking service on mobiles.

Nigel Morris, chief executive of Isobar, the Aegis division which produced Sprite Yard, said Isobar had already developed a Chinese content website for Coca-Cola which had amassed 35m subscribers. The site, Icoke, is thought to be the most popular global web property of the US drinks group.

Speaking to the FT at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Mr Morris said: “People look at the apparently low level of internet penetration in China and assume that the digital market is going to be relatively unsophisticated, but it really is not.”

Zenith Optimedia, part of Publicis, the Paris-listed marketing services group, also argues that the sheer scale of the Chinese market – Zenith forecasts that the number of online gamers in China will exceed the total UK population next year – could make it a valuable development base for skills and practices destined to be brought to Western markets at a later date.

In some instances, consumers have “leapfrogged” Western consumers’ conventional technological progression, moving straight to mobile without having first owned a fixed line service, or directly to broadband internet access without any experience of dial-up web surfing.

John Taylor, worldwide director of client services at Zenith Optimedia, which works for advertisers such as L’Oreal in China said: “There is a lot of talk in europe about advertisers using mobile coupons or advertising, but when you go to places like China and south Korea, the consumers are actually doing it already.”

In Western markets, development of mobile advertising has been hampered by the technical and commercial difficulties of finding partnerships between the advertiser, the mobile operator and consumers, who may be deterred if they are charged for replying to campaigns using text messages.